Intrusion of the Anatomy Smugglers
by I.C. Weener
Summary: Zatanna learns a new magic trick.


" _What do you care about some leggy dame in nylons? Or did I just answer my own question?"_

\- Zatanna, Batman: The Animated Series

" _I don't feel so good."_

\- Spider-Man

* * *

The bank vault exploded in a massive white ball of fire and metal shrapnel. An army of shadowy figures rushed into the vault with smoke masking their tracks. Dozens of bank patrons who happened to be cashing paychecks or taking out second mortgages at the wrong time were huddled in terror under cashier counters and office desks.

Perfectly on cue, Zatanna twirled from somewhere out of the air and landed with her arms raised. The instant her enamel heels clicked on the linoleum flooring, every criminal in the room instantly had their eyes on her. She never she knew why she always managed to attract the wrong kind of attention in every town she traveled to. Maybe it was just her photogenic personality.

The mastermind behind this robbery was one Patty Polaroid, a decidedly 1940s-inspired supervillainness who seemed like an odd matchup considering Zatanna's earliest appearances were during the mid-'60s. She wore a slim black tube dress styled to resemble a container of film stock.

Patty's underlings were giant cameras. They could have been men dressed up in camera costumes. Maybe they were cathode ray-powered robots designed to look like cameras. Or maybe it was like a Mandarin thing where they were all aliens that coincidentally resembled technology from Earth society before they crash landed on the planet. The only important detail was they were cameras.

Patty and her goons paused in the middle of their heist once Zatanna was on the scene. The camera-men dropped their money bags while Patty gave her opponent an annoyed look. Zatanna was about to deliver the magical _coup de grace_ out of her hat when the bank customers began to ominously rise to their feet.

They "talked" to one another with low groans that vaguely mimicked the sounds of Xerox machines. In an instant, they mindlessly rushed at Zatanna with their hands clawing outward. An old lady in a blue cardigan and a boy with a backwards baseball cap made it to her first and grabbed her forearms. They both had impossible strength for their ages.

"Hands off! I didn't ask for any volunteers!" Zatanna shouted in part surprise, and part agitation.

Looking closely at the old lady's eyes, she gasped. For a split second the woman's irises flashed in surreal inverted colors and gave away her true nature. No one in this bank was an actual civilian: They were all decoys.

The camera criminals watched idly from the blown out vault opening while a fight raged in the lobby. Zatanna freed herself by cracking her wand across the baseball kid's gut as a makeshift club. She sent the old lady impersonator sprawling backwards by throwing her top hate like a boomerang. She used all the tools of her trade to fight through the mob as they swarmed around her, but she was only one-of-a-kind while they were roughly about forty-of-a-kind. She was quickly finding herself outnumbered.

Patty Polaroid had seen more than her fair share of Rockette kicks and palm-generated lightning bolts while Zatanna was fighting, finding the whole struggle to be incredibly dull the moment it started. She snapped her fingers toward one of her camera underlings and made a quick rolling motion with her hand.

Zatanna levitated a fake banker in a business suit across the lobby and re-introduced him to gravity by telepathically smashing him through a wooden desk. She kneed one of the mindless drones in the stomach, flipped over his back as he doubled over, and took out another with a stiletto roundhouse.

Patty whistled to grab Zatanna's attention.

Zatanna instinctively turned around toward the shrill noise. The giant camera standing next to Patty flashed the phosphorous bulb on his head in a blinding beam of light. In one instant, Zatanna crossed her arms in front of her eyes to shield herself. In the next instant, she burst into a cloud of dust, leaving nothing but her stage costume as it dropped to the ground in an empty heap. Her top hat slowly drifting down from the air and landed neatly on top.

The dark and dazzling mistress of magic had been dispelled in a single fatal frame.

A few seconds later, the giant camera opened his film slot and ejected a fully developed Zatanna from a chamber filled with red light. She was nude from head to toe and flopped to the floor in a thick pool of phenidone solution. She silently rose to her feet, acting oblivious to her tangled black hair and the chemicals dripping from her body.

Patty gave her a passing glimpse and saw enough.

"Show's over for you, Tinkerbell. Go sprinkle your pixie dust and get in line with the rest of the Negatives," she said in an impatient and pushy voice.

"Are you adding me to the family album?" the reborn Zatanna murmured with flat lips.

"You're already in it," Patty replied with a small implication of a smirk.

Zatanna slogged toward the mob in her soullessness and nakedness, becoming another blank face among countless others. They reacted with the same indifference toward her exposed state as she did. The horde was united in their complete lack of human empathy.

The camera-men picked up their bundles of money and made their easy escape. Patty led her camera crew straight out the door with no one left in her way. The army of photocopied thralls followed closely behind in the world's most unfeeling parade. A certain vacant-eyed black-haired sorceress was somewhere in the middle, indistinguishable from the rest of the stoic walking portraits.

* * *

 _Author's note: This ain't no Donald Sutherland movie, son._


End file.
